


got a blank space baby (i'll write your name)

by notalone91



Series: LoserFest 2021 [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Deleted Scenes, Lists, M/M, Recovered Memories, The Derry Townhouse (IT)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:06:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalone91/pseuds/notalone91
Summary: Eddie makes lists.  He has since he was a little boy.  Lists for everything.  On the way to Derry, he makes one.  At the Jade, he makes another.  Someone else has a list of their own for him.[loserfest2021]
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Series: LoserFest 2021 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138544
Comments: 23
Kudos: 32





	got a blank space baby (i'll write your name)

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt for LoserFest Day 1 - A Generic Taylor Thing. I chose the number 13.

Eddie wrote lists. That was a fact that should have been of no surprise to any of the Losers upon their return to Derry. On the drive up 95 to Derry, he’d quickly made one on his phone’s voice recorder. 

13 Things I remember about Derry:

  * I grew up there.
  * Mike and 5 other friends - Lucky seven, Losers
  * Bullied
  * Mom was- worse? I don’t know. I think I liked her less before we moved and I can’t remember why?
  * Scared
  * Asthma
  * There was a carnival?? Maybe?? Circus?
  * Kids died. A lot. Like… a bizarre amount. A bunch of kids went missing a while before we left and mom thought i was gonna go missing too
  * There was a really good ice cream shop that felt like falling in love
  * I fell in love. He had glasses. He was a he. 
  * I’m gay. And I knew that. There was no sad sexless thing like there is with marty 
  * We fought something
  * You’ll Float, too.



Then. Richie hit that fucking gong and everything clicked into place. 

Sitting at the Jade, he tapped out another list in the notes on his phone.

13 Things I remember about Him:

  * Hated cologne but always smelled really good
  * Doesn’t matter how many times he brushes his hair, it’s always a fucking mess
  * He’s a fucking mess
  * He is always warm. Like a space heater. I don’t get it.
  * He makes fun of me and I can’t believe he still does why does he fucking do that
  * Our Anniversary was September 22nd. He took me to the ice cream shop and nothing was different and then he kissed me and it fit 
  * He has a birthmark over his left hip that looks like a thumbs up. 
  * He can’t hold hands with his right hand because his thumb has to be on top and i’m sitting on his left
  * He is immediately drawn to things that are little and cute. “That’s why i like you, eds” 
  * He tried to go vegetarian because animals but kept forgetting that chicken and turkey and fish are still meat and decided that it didn’t make sense to keep going when he’d already been eating them all his life.
  * I left before junior year, which isn’t about him, but I remember how he held me and let me cry and didn’t make fun of me at all that night. That’s how i knew he was hurting too
  * I loved him.
  * I might still love him.



“What’cha writing, Eds? Not another list, I hope,” Richie asked, leaning over and wrapping his arm around Eddie’s shoulder. 

He blushed and put his phone face down on the table, closer to Ben. “Actually, asshole, some of us have real jobs to attend to. The world doesn’t stop because I’m here. People-” He mentally started on the sister list to his last list: Things I’d forgotten about him. Item 1, how long his fucking freak arms are. He watched his phone come back in Richie’s hand. “Still need my attention.”

Rolling his eyes, Richie regarded the lock on the phone like wrapping paper. Decorative, but totally unnecessary. “Number code still the Munster’s address?” he asked with one eyebrow quirked up teasingly as he entered 1313 anyway.

“Give it back,” he said, panic coursing through his veins. “I swear to god, asshole, if you-”

Richie looked at the screen for a moment before releasing it with a laugh. “You could have just said you were texting your wife, dude.” He rubbed his hand over Eddie’s shoulder.

Not long after, their reunion explodes around them. He does his best to ignore how right it feels when he says that he’s with Richie, even if he doesn’t mean it that way. They get back to the inn and, instead of going to his own room across the hall, Richie follows Eddie into his. “Should we talk about the list?” 

Truthfully, at the moment, no. No, he doesn’t. What he wants is to get back in his car and get out of Derry, but of course, he made sure that he unpacked his suitcase and everything else he brought with him, down to the entire contents of his medicine chest. “I want to, but not right now.”

“If we both leave…” Richie looks down at his feet and sighs. “If we both leave, who knows how long it’ll be before we forget again. Maybe a day. Maybe an hour. When I left for L.A., I had forgotten you before I got off the plane.” He chewed on his bottom lip and adjusted his glasses absently. "We might not get another chance."

Eddie felt himself crumble. “It’s… isn’t that good? You appear to have a good thing going out there,” he said, turning to face him after dumping the armful of clothes casually into his suitcase without any order. “You don’t need to worry about me. I’ll go back to my w- Myra. I’ll go home and everything will go back to the way it was. Business calls and smothering and loveless marriage and it’ll be great.” He turns back to the dresser and scoops up an armful of clothes to throw into his bag so he can get the fuck out of here.

Standing in the doorway was about all Richie could manage to do. He wanted to move closer, but he knew that if he did, he might pick Eddie up and fireman’s carry him down the step, throw him in his car, and drive for wherever the car took them. Instead, he closed his eyes and steadied his impulses. “13 reasons I know I never stopped loving you even though I forgot you. Number 1,” he said, leaning against the doorframe heavily. “I won’t date someone if they don’t have brown eyes. I’ve told myself for years that it was just one of those things, but it’s not. Number 2, I hired my manager based solely upon the cadence of his voice because, despite the frenetic energy, it calms me. Number 3. You were the first person I thought of after Mike called. Not you, specifically, but just how scared the you shaped void in my memory must be. Number 4,” he said smiling as he folded his arms, watching Eddie gape open-mouthed at him. “You married your mother and I just knew it, just like you knew I don’t write my material.” Eddie seemed to want to interrupt, but Richie held up a hand. “Not done. Number, what, five?” he asked. Eddie nodded, so he went on. “Number 5. You knew I don’t write my material which means that you felt it, too, because you saw some shitty comedy central special and went ‘he’s cute and funny but he didn’t write this because it doesn’t sound like him’.” He shook his head and looked back at the floor. “Number 6. There’s this little voice in the back of my head every time I get drunk or do something stupid telling me all the ways it’s going to kill me and how I need to take better care of myself and that I need to go get Pedialyte and something to fill my stomach and sleep on my side and make sure I have Tylenol and a bucket by my bed or the couch or wherever I crash.” 

Eddie looked concerned and crossed to him. He had read, a while back, something about a rehab stint and it hadn’t landed hard on his conscience. It wasn’t his business, he didn’t know him, but somehow, he was worried about it. His secretary had said that it probably had something to do with past lives, but not to think too deep into it. If only he had…

Instead of giving up his list, like he thought he might, Richie laughed. “Number 7. Every crowd, I look for the person who looks like he wants to fight me just because I had the audacity to open my mouth,” he said, voice pitching down incredulously, “at a show that he paid money to come to just to see me talk.” He paused. There were things he wanted to say, but they weren’t really ways he should have known. “Number 8. There are certain songs I can’t listen to anymore. But I think I could now. Because I know why I couldn’t. They were on that tape that was in my car that we used to put on when we’d drive out to the barrens to fuck.” Seeing the shock on Eddie’s face, he quickly adds, “Number 9. I know that I can say that and you’re not going to be mad because you never could be mad at me for long. Pissy, sure. Mad, no.” 

Frowning, Eddie sat on the edge of the bed closest to the door. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. It was a lot to handle. But he knew it was the truth. Every fucking word. 

“Number 10. Every time I got better at an accent or impression, there would be this judgy little voice in the back of my head that I’d have to hear laugh before I knew it was okay for human consumption. That was you.” Richie looked around the room, taking in every open drawer and door and smiled fondly. “Number 11. I’m actively not commenting on the way you put everything away as soon as you got here because of course you did. You wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.” 

Eddie laughed a little and hung his head. By the time he looked up again, Richie was wringing his hands nervously. 

He started to move into the room, then froze. “Number 12. I’m fighting every urge in my body to kiss you and hold your hand and… other things. I’ve been fighting that urge since I saw you and I’m exhausted because it feels so natural. Being way over here feels wrong.” Eddie reached a hand out to him and tugged him down beside him, entwining their fingers tightly. “Number last,” he said smiling sadly, “As much as I want to get the fuck out of here, right now, I don’t want to leave without you because I don’t want to forget you again.”

Leaning into him, Eddie carefully gauged him for a moment, waiting for the psyche that never came. He weighed out his options for all of five seconds. Go back to Myra. Go with Richie. No brainer. Tugging the taller man down into a deep kiss, he felt himself embolden. “Go get your shit. We’ll figure it out on the way.”

“Are you serious?” Richie asked, totally dumbfounded. He kept his hand on Eddie’s neck, staring into his eyes, the very same ones he’d been searching for all his adult life. “If you’re not I don’t know what I’ll do.”

A broken sigh escaped his lips. “I’m dead serious. Let’s do it.”

Richie bolted across the hall to his room, grabbing his still packed duffel from the bed and returning in no time flat. “I’ll meet you downstairs?”

“Rich?” Eddie called back before he even realized he was doing it. He padded out into the hall. 

Stopped on the second step, Richie was facing his doorway. “What’s up?”

He ran his fingers through Richie’s hair, like he suddenly remembered that he’d done a million times before and shook his own head. “I l-”

Richie darted back up the steps. He caught Eddie by the mouth and interrupted that thought. “Not yet,” he said quietly. “Don’t say it until we’re out of here.”

With a smile, Eddie nodded. “Okay. I won’t.”

Sitting on the plane, waiting for it to leave for LAX a week later, Richie opens a document on his phone.

13 Reasons I should have let him say it.

  * I’d have heard him say it as an adult.
  * We could have decided to leave together anyway.
  * He meant it.
  * I meant it, too.
  * He might not have died. I mean, the power of love saved Bev the first time. It might’ve saved him. I could have saved him.
  * We probably wouldn’t have stopped saying it to each other the whole time.
  * I might have been brave enough to fight them to get him out of there.
  * Huey Lewis and Celine Dion preached about the power so idk maybe
  * I wouldn’t be writing this fucking list
  * He would have known I knew even though I knew
  * His dying words wouldn’t have been a fucking your mom joke.
  * It might not hurt this much.
  * I could have said it back.




End file.
